2010 RIII Touring Gains 81 lbs. Wet Weight??

[JCC11]

How is it possible that the 2009 R3 Touring gains 81 lbs. in one short year? The bike has very few changes in 2010, but according to the Triumph website the 2009 weighs 788 lbs wet, while the 2010 weighs 869 wet. Any explanation?

[Power-Tripp]

Part of this is due to the new 2010 emissions equipment.

Part of it is due to Triumph showing wet weights differently on the 2010 models... all of them.

[Diego]

I believe nearly all the difference is the method of determining wet weight, if it's real at all. There's no emission equipment that's going to add that much mass.

Plus, let's remember that Triumph's website developers are notoriously bad at converting between units of measure. The number may be completely in error, for all any of us know.

[JCC11]

Ok....but 81 pounds?? That's a huge change. The difference is more than if they measured dry weight one model year and then wet weight the next model year. And yet they clearly note that the measurement was wet. In fact, there is a footnote stating that wet weights are determined with all fluid levels at maximum. There is no room for discretion here. Something else has changed on this bike to add 81 pounds, and I would very much like to know what it is .

Suspiciously, the R3T has also grown 1/10th of an inch in length .

[Trapper]

I think if you weighted the 09's you would find that the original weight was in error and that this is just a correction. I have an R111 and R111T and buy the book they weighed about the same. I have always felt that the R11T weighted quite a bit more but never thought it was worth finding a scale to prove it.

Trapper

[TRIIICK]

The general consensus on other forums is that it's a typo error..

[Diego]

Don't get in a tizzy over everything you read on the 'net, JCC. As I say, the Web developers Triumph uses are notoriously bad with numbers!

Those who have been here a while will remember the flap about a year and a half ago over R3T fuel tank capacities. One place, they had copied and pasted from another model's description, apparently meaning to go in and update it later, but never did; while in another place, they had the capacity in liters correct, but converted to US gallons erroneously.

Sometimes you have to wait for the printed literature and downloadable brochures to get the more reliable specs on a model.

[50002]

I do believe that the new Roadster has added a flux capacitor, possibly accounting for the added weight.

[Jamo]

I never see consistant, accurate weight listed on cycles. THer's always some difference, whether they weigh the batter, full tank, coolant, etc.

I'd like to see some consistency.

[Diego]

OK, folks. Here's the scoop. The weight for last year's model is DRY weight, despite what the label for that parameter says on the 2009 spec page now. The discrepancy has arisen on other Triumph models as well, including some for which I still had my print-outs from previous years. Thus, I can describe pretty accurately what happened.

What you need to remember is that Triumph's Web developers do not write individual pages for each model and each year. Their bike pages all carry an .aspx extension, meaning they are not regular HTML documents that exist in completed form on the server, but are generated on the fly as a user calls for them.

All the spec pages for all contemporary Triumphs are based on one single template that contains labels for all the relevant parameters...wheelbase, power, torque, fuel capacity, etc., including weight. The only thing that varies from one page to the next when a user wants to view them is which exact model is called up from the database to fill in the numbers. Saves a LOT of expensive development time. And that's fine, as long as the method of measuring those parameters and the units used are the same among all the bikes, which it normally is for any given nation within any given year model.

The problem is, Triumph switched from dry measurement to wet for the weight between these two model years. They told the Web developers "show wet weight from now on." So, the developers changed the word "dry" to "wet" on the template. No problem--except the same template is being used for both the 2009 and 2010 models, and the old weight numbers (still showing on the 2009 pages with the same numbers as a year ago) are NOT wet weight. Only the labelling has been changed to confuse the innocent!

Now, as for:

Ok....but 81 pounds?? That's a huge change. The difference is more than if they measured dry weight one model year and then wet weight the next model year. .... Something else has changed on this bike to add 81 pounds....

Not so! This is a big bike, so there is a huge difference between dry and wet. Do the math.

We've got 5.9 US gallons of fuel (or more). Depending on the mix and temperature, gasoline weighs 6.1 to 6.5 pounds per gallon, so expect the fuel to weigh up to 38 pounds all by itself. There are 5.9 litres of engine/gearbox oil and 0.17 litre of drive shaft oil, for a total weight of just under 12 pounds. Coolant adds another 6+ pounds. Yuasa specs the battery at 11 pounds. That's 67 pounds right there, plus a couple more for brake fluid gives us almost 70 of that 81 pounds very easily.

Not knowing what else they left off the machine for dry weight calculation in years past, it's hard to guess what the exact wet-minus-dry difference should be, but clearly we're very much in the ballpark with these numbers. Kind of aggravating to try to understand during the transition, but given that it will be wet weights from Triumph from now on, with everything at maximum level, that should give us the consistency and accuracy that Jamo seeks.